1. Field
The disclosed and claimed concept relates generally to handheld electronic devices and, more particularly, to a handheld electronic device and method that provide an advanced text editing function in a text disambiguation environment.
2. Background Information
Numerous types of handheld electronic devices are known. Examples of such handheld electronic devices include, for instance, personal data assistants (PDAs), handheld computers, two-way pagers, cellular telephones, and the like. Many handheld electronic devices also feature wireless communication capability, although many such handheld electronic devices are stand-alone devices that are functional without communication with other devices.
In order to reduce their size, some handheld electronic devices have been provided with keypads wherein at least some of the keys each have a plurality of characters such as Latin letters assigned thereto. During a text entry operation or other operation using such a keypad, an actuation of a key having a plurality of characters assigned thereto will be ambiguous. Such devices are usually configured with some type of disambiguation routine that is executable thereon and that resolves the ambiguity of the input. Disambiguation routines can include multi-tap routines and dictionary-based routines, by way of example.
Dictionary-based disambiguation routines have been generally effective for their intended purposes but have not been without limitation. A dictionary ultimately possesses a limited number of words that can be used to disambiguate an ambiguous text input. While it is known to provide data structures that can learn new words that the user has input, such learning databases typically do not assist with the actual inputting of the new words. It is generally understood that the inputting of a new word on a handheld electronic device having a reduced keyboard requires significantly more concentration and effort than the inputting of a word that is already known to the device. For instance, with each keystroke a user typically must carefully examine the proposed disambiguated interpretations of the ambiguous input and choose the one that correctly reflects the user's intended input, if such an interpretation is available. If the user tries to enter a word not knowing that it is not already stored on the handheld electronic device, the proposed disambiguated interpretations of the ambiguous input typically will be quite different than the input intended by the user. In such a situation, the user oftentimes must delete most or all of the typed word and retype the word while carefully selecting for each keystroke the desired disambiguated interpretation, as mentioned above. It thus would be desirable to provide an improved handheld electronic device and method that overcome these and other shortcomings.
Similar numerals refer to similar parts throughout the specification.